by Ben Pastor
“But there’s no proof your boys went into the Yar,” Bora objected, “much less that they were killed.” He showed the wooden button he still carried in his pocket. “Was this your father-in-law’s?”
How could he have known? The small sister was staggered; she covered her mouth, glancing back as if to make sure her sibling was out of earshot. “It comes from my nephew’s coat, the coat that used to belong to his father. Where did you find it, poshany Major?”
Bora felt an inner chill, and wouldn’t say. He modified the statement he’d been about to make to “There’s no proof he was killed” because it seemed obvious that at least one of the boys had ended up in the woods, and also possible that his grandfather had been killed just after he’d found the clue. “Don’t frighten your sister for now. Stay away from the Yar, both of you, and tell me what else you know about it.”
The rest was whispered to him away from the house, where the farm woman stood to avoid being overheard by her sister, and where, of his own accord, Bora righted a spindly gate, fallen in from the last gaping, rickety fence.
He learnt that in Makhno’s days the older sister, twelve at the time, had been taken from her parents’ farm at Sharkov, brought to Krasny Yar and raped, which was why she also had another child, a daughter twenty-two years of age, now an army nurse. “Father went looking for her, and Makhno’s men shot him. My sister won’t talk of those days, poshany Major, not even to us. She’s so scared of the dark even now, you have to keep the candle burning at night.” (Or else she gets drunk to be able to fall asleep, Bora told himself.) “She won’t go near the woods, be sure of that, not even for her son. When the priest from Losukovka came a few days ago and walked with his procession around the Yar, she wouldn’t look out of the window.”
“In the years after that war, did you live here?”
She shook her head. “We moved. Our husbands worked at the warehouse in Smijeff. We came back to our father-in-law’s when we were widowed, but were in Sharkov when he died.”
Afterwards, summarizing things to the sergeant, Bora wondered out loud, “About the kidnapping: what can the dark have to do with it? The Yar is anything but a dark forest, even at its thickest. Was the girl raped overnight? Night is dark everywhere.”
“They might have thrown a cloth over her head, or kept her hooded the time she was with Makhno’s men. How did she escape, Herr Major?”
“The younger sister was quite small at the time, and doesn’t remember. She is aware the Bolsheviks replaced the Black Army, but can’t tell for sure whether it was they who freed the girl or if she had picked her way out of the woods. On the other hand, both women were familiar with a boy who went missing at that time. He was found hanging from a tree at the edge of the woods, stripped naked.”
Nagel glanced at the house, at the woods, and back at the house. “It’s all very strange, Herr Major. Looks as if discouraging folks from going into the Yar is the main idea. But there are towns and collective farms that could have organized expeditions through the years, not to speak of the government or the Red Army. They could have resolved the matter had they wanted to. Or were the woods declared off limits for whatever reason?”
“That’s what I think. But if they were, it wasn’t done officially. Which is why I wanted you here today: I have no clearance to do so, but I’m going to take another look before we go in with the regiment.”
With the privilege of a senior non-com, Nagel shook his head. “Well, sir, I’m not about to wait out here. We’ve been through worse things than a patch of Russian woods, the Major and I. And if the women can keep an eye on our mounts, I’m ready when the Major is.”
Considering the irregularity of the errand, it was a mark of Nagel’s regard for him. And Bora, usually so spare with effusions, went as far as allowing himself a friendly tap on the sergeant’s shoulder. “Let’s go, then.”
Entering Krasny Yar from the once well-kept “Friendship of the Peoples” confines, he understood at once how the accumulation of leaves over the seasons concealed the irregularity of the terrain throughout the woods. Days after the rain the low-lying areas were still wet if not soggy, while others, rock-strewn, stayed scrubby and dry. Overgrown fruit trees, long returned to the wild, had survived their extinct farmsteads (the place had been settled in the late 1700s, and kept as pasture then), while elsewhere one stumbled upon rotten planks and stumps that had once sustained sheds or lean-tos, beyond living memory. No trace of man-made paths remained. Still, the dismantled structures pointed to a possible reason for the locals to come foraging here during the Great War, and later in the years of the Famine: scrap wood to burn or reuse, small apples, berries, mushrooms. The Russian peasant’s ability to live off the barest essentials made even the Yar a promising – if scary – place to come beggaring through. After all, not all those who’d strayed into Krasny Yar had died, despite Father Victor’s dreams and tales of wild creatures and ghosts.
Ahead, the thin, trilling chatter of small birds drew festoons of sound from tree to tree, as green as their striped livery; deeper in, woodpeckers’ calls sounded like people whistling insistently for their dogs. The Germans proceeded in view of each other, cutting through the Yar at a ninety-degree angle from Bora’s first visit, when he’d met Father Victor. Although their compasses functioned for the time being, both snapped branches or blazed young trees with pocket knives to mark their trail. Seeking to pick up signs of human presence, they followed a north-north-west direction, towards the blasted tree where those of the 241st had recovered Kalekin’s remains. Muddy spots were checked for footprints; heaped leaves for signs of discomposure.
Absence of recognizable tracks meant nothing per se in Russian forests: those who did frequent them knew how to mask their passage. Russian partisans hid well, not to mention the small razvedchiki units, no doubt making forays on this side of the Donets as much as their counterparts, German scouts, did on the other side. Depending on their cleverness and training, partisans were either less or more accurate at erasing their traces than Red Army soldiers.
The blasted tree, the dark line of firs were still distant. Birches and nut-bearing trees, nameless shrubs alternated all around. A boundary legible on Bora’s map and notes, and marked on the ground only by a shallow, narrow gully that fallen leaves concealed, marked the German minefield some three hundred paces to the men’s right. Depending on Manstein’s plans, it would either be cleared next month or added to.
Approaching as he did today, but not so much from the direction he’d come from the first time, Bora could see how the ridge where lightning had struck the tree and Kalekin had been found was in fact circumscribed. Skirting it gave the impression of a rise or mound with a ditch on three sides rather than what in Russia was usually called – depending on its dimensions – a yar, balka, or ovrag. Today, the shape reminded Bora of ancient or medieval earthworks. Even the Great War trenches he and his brother had explored as vacationing boys in the woods of East Prussia had more in common with this kind of trough than a natural rift in the land did.
He gestured for Nagel to pause, and snapped photographs of the rise and of the hollow over which the blasted tree reclined bridge-wise. This, too, was interesting upon closer examination. Bora crouched to see if it was merely a cleft gaping at the foot of the large stump or if there was more to it. He got down on his hands and knees, moving aside creepers and brush. It seemed to be no more than a dip in the land, crowded with dead leaves, overarched by long-branched thorn bushes. But if he parted the tangle (a horseman’s gloves came in handy) a burrow was revealed, yawning in the flank of the rise. Larger than a fox hole but not by much, choked by brambles, it measured maybe forty centimetres top to bottom, and little more from side to side.
Again Bora signalled, this time for Nagel to stand watch while he continued to explore. Nagel, who had a penchant for worrying about him, didn’t seem enthusiastic, but obeyed.
Shining an electric torch inside the hole revealed nothing but clumped soil and a jumble
of hairy roots. From the pasted-down texture of the dirt ledge, it appeared as if the animal it must be a home to had recently squeezed through. Entering was out of the question for a man of Bora’s size. He was about to resign himself to lying on his belly and peering as far as he could crane his neck, when on a whim he decided to strip the thorn branches where they hung thickest, to the left of the small opening. A not so cramped gap came into view then, sufficient – with some effort – to allow the passage of someone who did not suffer from claustrophobia. Bora put his head in, then his arm holding the electric torch, and squeezed himself forward enough to illuminate the dark space. By that very motion, the woods above, Nagel, the world at large became instantly far away and foreign. It was irresistible. Bora pulled himself back and changed direction so as to put his booted legs in first, and sank out of sight.
Open German army food cans were the first objects he recognized on the ground, then a razor case, unstitched, of the type Soviet soldiers carried, a half-rotted wooden box or lidless crate against the dirt wall, with nothing inside. Bora couldn’t stand up in the small space, maybe a metre and a half in height and twice that much across, partly timbered. A cave-in of soil and planks as the vault had given way, towards the centre of the rise, further reduced the available room. At his feet, in the dark wet dirt, Bora glimpsed the bowl of a hand-carved spoon, typical of the resourceful Russian infantryman. The break on the shaft was new, sharp. A soggy tatter turned out to be a triangular canvas bag resembling a holster, its upper loop and lower buckle gone, which he identified as a Red Army axe cover. The round tin with something inside that had been scooped out like food contained in fact German boot grease. He recalled the soldiers of the 241st telling him about pieces of equipment and material disappearing around Krasny Yar.
He regretted not having a flash on his Kodak camera. With his foot he turned over the tins to shine a light on the impressed dates, double-checked the dilapidated wooden box for markings, and pried as far as he could into the timber-and-dirt collapse. Once he had finished, he had to admit that, as for many enterprises, it was easier getting in than out. There was nothing to grab on to to clamber out into the open; dirt crumbled and fell in chunks. When Bora did squeeze through at last, the greenness outside and Nagel’s sturdy figure a few steps away welcomed him back into a dangerous but less oppressive world.
“They used it recently, Nagel, although the hole has been there a long time. The wooden box – an ammunition crate, I think – goes back to the Great War at least. It makes you wonder whether the older sister was kept in a similar hideout twenty years ago. It’s dark enough, even in daytime.” He described the shelter, listing the objects inside. “All our army tins bear the 1942 date, so they might be the pilfered items the 241st Company men told me about. What do you make of it?”
Nagel wore a habitual frown. One had to know his careworn face as well as Bora had learnt to in order to recognize a lack of real concern on it. “There’s not many of them at any rate, Herr Major – five at most, from what you said. Either that, or they have other such holes in the woods. They tried to eat boot grease? Could be untrained irregulars, or civilians hiding for whatever reason. It could be runaway Jews.”
Neither of them spoke the word deserters. Neither of them mentioned to what excesses sieges and starvation had brought German and Russian soldiers in the past two years. Nagel skirted the subject. “If it happens to be anyone left over from the civil war, he’d be in his forties, minimum, and pretty out of his mind by now.”
“Just the right combination to get you to hack up or dismember your victims.”
“Or eat them, Herr Major. On this front we’ve seen that, too.”
There, Nagel had said it. “Christ, let’s hope not.” Irregulars, civilians, deserters. Jews. Hadn’t the Security Service been on the lookout for Dorfjuden? Bora formulated the thought and found it highly unpleasant. Would desperate rural Jews in hiding eat tinned pork meat? Probably. Would they steal it in the first place? If they don’t read German, yes. And why wouldn’t they kill? “Jews would go out of their way to avoid being discovered,” he reasoned.
“Yes, sir. Although as long as German soldiers aren’t harmed, it’s not automatic that we’d intervene. We haven’t thus far.”
Together they climbed the rise and looked around as far as the curtain of trees allowed. The wind, still blowing over the woods, mimicked the fresh sound of running water. Bora pointed out where he’d found the wooden button, and the spot where the soldiers had retrieved Kalekin’s corpse. “I wonder what they did with the old fellow’s head,” he grumbled. “The truth is, we could be facing the same individual – or individuals – who have holed up here and committed murder for the past twenty-odd years, or else entirely different people who have found shelter in the Yar ever since. It could be someone who only occasionally frequents the woods. As you say, Nagel, if there’s any pattern, the aim seems to be to keep folks away. What for? What are they guarding?”
“Maybe just their own hides, Herr Major.”
“Right.”
In a zigzag they kept heading north, careful to note any evidence on the forest floor that might reveal sinkholes, caves, trenches. From the quadrant where the woods became thicker as they followed an imperceptible slope, gradually extending to the Udy River and its mined banks, Bora had the impression for a moment of smelling an open fire somewhere. Abstinence from cigarettes ever since the start of Barbarossa had granted him a keen sense of smell, useful in the field although a definite disadvantage in unclean quarters (not to mention the horrific stench of death at Stalingrad, the memory of which sickened him to this day). Depending on the direction of the wind over the Yar, ragging the heads of the higher trees and making the sombre edge of firs boom like a sea cliff, the odour of smoke could come from one of the farms toward Krasnaya Polyana or Schubino, or even from across the Donets, as on the day Khan had arrived and cinders of the grass fire he’d himself set had fallen all around like snow.
Bora recalled the woods on the enemy bank, where the half-blind old woman had mistaken him for a Russian recruit, and how he’d thought then she resembled the deadly hag of the fairy tale, Baba Yaga. Khan compared himself to the witch, flying in her magical iron mortar and rowing with a broom that sweeps the air behind it. But no Baba Yaga, no koldun, ghosts or goblins made fires. Nagel signalled that he smelt it too. The odour of burning wood on a warm day might not necessarily indicate a man-made fire, either, much less a hearth. On the rocky outcrops dry brush could go up in smoke by itself.
Now and then one or the other looked quickly in the direction of where sounds like small animals scuttling about crinkled the air. Nothing was ever seen. Were there partisans lying in wait, watching them, their invisibility would be the same: the unforgiving, seldom-failing crack of SVT rifles would have long ago made all the difference. Or it might soon. Bora regretted allowing Nagel to come along. The risk is mine; why involve a family man in all this? As for himself, he felt remarkably at peace. If they shoot me now, my spirit will fly at once out of here, back to Merefa and into my trunk and inside the envelope where Dikta’s naked photo is. If there’s a heaven, that’s heaven. In a sealed envelope with my wife, because what I desire most is to put my hand between her legs as I did in Prague – just my hand, so my fingers may nudge the breath-thin silk away from the tender well of her flesh. It surprised him how sober and lucid he could remain while thinking about it, aware of the smallest detail around him and yet just as authentically in the Prague room where they’d wantonly touched and savoured each other half the night before making love for the long other half. At one point the scent of woodbine wafted overwhelmingly to him from a cluster of dead trees, and Bora breathed it in to the bottom of his lungs (you never know which scent is the last you’re going to inhale); the questioning call of a cuckooshka from its perch, so much like a mechanical bird’s in a German clock, sounded to his ears familiar and unnerving at the same time.
Nagel’s figure came and went behind the trees a
s he kept to Bora’s right. It felt lonely in spite of him. He and I could get lost and not know it for a while, Bora thought. I could already be dead and not know it. If God loved me, I’d have died in Prague, when Dikta sat astride my knees, facing me, letting me search her with my hand, kissing me. But here I am. Inside the compass, which had functioned well until now, the needle had begun to tremble and become aimless. Bora pointed to the small round case on his palm, and the sergeant, who was looking his way, nodded to show he’d noticed the same.
On they went, orienting themselves exclusively by landmarks. A negligible ditch indicated on maps as Orekhovy became important, with its namesake, a growth of walnut trees, alongside it. For the compass, north was everywhere and nowhere, but the nut-tree ditch stayed still. The land dipped and rose; uncharted lesser mounds were perceivable. Bora marked them on his map without stopping to explore them now. At one point they had to cross the ditch to continue, and it was a threshold. The mid-morning hour and its warmth took on a new garb, a new face: the wind fell; a stillness was created where birds turned silent first around the men, and then, like a widening circle in a pond, the singing ceased further and further away from them, until the entire woodland became soundless.
“Herr Major,” Nagel said, and nothing else.
A storm of flies raged noiselessly ahead, where a small clearing outlined a patch of green light. Steady-hearted as he judged himself to be, Bora felt a rise of anxiety, a kind of superstitious repugnance at going further. But I’ll go, I’ll go. Whatever it is, I’ll register it on camera, too. It could be anything from a creature that died a natural death to an animal sacrifice that dingbat priest has carried out, if he dared come this deep into the Yar. As if he didn’t know what it most likely was.
On his part, Nagel fully anticipated matters, because he halted after calling Bora’s attention to the flies. Bora kept walking.